“But although the Chapel hangs on tenaciously to the skirts of the ancient Abbey and the ancient Church, yet that solemn architectural pause between the two—which arrests the most careless observer, and renders it a separate structure, a foundation ‘adjoining the Abbey,’ rather than forming part of it—corresponds with marvellous fidelity to the pause and break in English history of which Henry VII.’s reign is the expression. It is the close of the Middle Ages: the apple of Granada in its ornaments shows that the last Crusade was over; its flowing draperies and classical attributes indicate that the Renaissance had already begun. It is the end of the Wars of the Roses combining Henry’s right of conquest with his fragile claim of hereditary descent. On the one hand, it is a glorification of the victory of Bosworth. The angels at the four corners of the tomb, held or hold the likeness of the crown which he won on that famous day. In the stained glass we see the same crown hanging on the green bush in the fields of Leicestershire. On the other hand, like the Chapel of King’s College at Cambridge, it asserts everywhere the memory of the ‘holy Henry’s shade’; the Red Rose of Lancaster appears in every pane of glass: in every corner is the Portcullis—the Alters securitas, as he termed it, with an allusion to its own meaning, and the double safeguard of his succession—which he derived through John of Gaunt from the Beaufort Castle in Anjou inherited from Blanche of Navarre by Edmund Crouchback; whilst Edward IV. and Elizabeth of York are commemorated by intertwining these Lancastrian symbols with the Greyhound of Cecilia Neville, wife of Richard, Duke of York, with the Rose in the Sun, which scattered the mist at Barnet, and the Falcon on the Fetterlock, by which the first Duke of York expressed to his descendants that ‘he was locked up from the hope of the kingdom, but advising them to be quiet and silent, as God knoweth what may come to pass.’
“It is also the revival of the ancient Celtic-British
Westminster Abbey: Cloisters
Westminster Abbey: South-west
element in the English monarchy, after centuries of eclipse. It is a strange and striking thought, as we mount the steps of Henry VII.’s Chapel, that we enter there a mausoleum of princes, whose boast it was to be descended not from the Confessor or the Conqueror, but from Arthur and Llewellyn; and that roundabout the tomb, side by side with the emblems of the great English Houses, is to be seen the Red Dragon of the last British King Cadwallader—‘the dragon of the great Pendragonship,’ of Wales, thrust forward by the Tudor King in every direction, to supplant the hated White Boar of his departed enemy—the fulfilment, in another sense than the old Welsh bards had dreamt, of their prediction that the progeny of Cadwallader should reign again.”—(A. P. S.)